Character Sheets

I've debated scrapping character sheets before, but I stick with them for two reasons.

First, it it helps me spot if a character isn't going to be appropriate to my game's setting. My games take place in somewhat defined worlds I try to establish clearly in my setting info. Occasionally I fail at the clear part, and someone gets confused. Most of the time, they just don't pay any attention and submit the antithesis of what's called for. For example, in a game where it was an important part of the setting that humans didn't know about supernatural otherworldly beings, someone gave their character a back-story involving a battle between demons and humans. Whatever the case, if there's an issue, I can catch it before those problems come up in game.

Second, it does help me get a look at a person's style. I used to require a writing sample as part of my game applications, but I stopped doing that a while back. That means the profile, along with checking if the person has played any games here, is all I have to go on. My standards are a lot more lax than they used to be, so I rarely wind up rejecting people for anything but obvious cases of "did not even glance at the rules and setting." However, there still may be times that someone's style just does not mesh with mine at all.

What I expect out of a profile, though, isn't much. I stress that brief answers are fine so long as they're polished (since, again, it's all I have to go on). It's surprising what you can tell just from a few sentences per field. Longer is perfectly fine, though. As long as it accomplishes its goal -- giving me an idea of the character and how that character fits within the setting -- it works for me.

I always use variations of this profile:

Name:
Age:
Physical Description:
Personality:
Abilities:
Any Other Info:

This is the bare bones, of course. I add other game-specific fields as necessary (e.g. a space pirate game may have a "Position" field that specifies position on the ship, or "Occupation" in a modern RP where most everyone has a job/is looking for a job/is a student/etc. and is defined by that). However, I think I can get a good snapshot of a character with the above. "Abilities" may be phrased differently depending on the game and what kind of abilities are allowed, and it's a pretty important field in terms of judging whether a character fits into the game.

A "Bio" or "History" field may be included, but I often make that optional (for the sake of players who don't like to reveal everything at once). I think knowing a character's background is helpful, and in some games I do require it, but it can put pressure on people to write out every inch of a character's life and put themselves in danger of meta-gaming. I haven't run into this attitude much, but I can respect it when I do. I feel similarly about Personality -- I like a brief idea, but I don't think the player needs to reveal the character's every facet if they don't want to, and it doesn't need to be highly specific or set in stone because characters often grow. I'm really looking for a feel for the character's general nature.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RolePlayGateway/~3/a-lp23p_2kk/viewtopic.php

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